Cut audio without handing it to a website
The "free online audio cutter" and "ringtone maker" sites are some of the ad-heaviest,
upload-hungriest corners of the web — and the clip you're cutting is often a private
voice memo or a recording you don't own the rights to reshare. Tape Desk does the whole
job on your device: it decodes the file with your browser's own audio engine, and the
trimming, splicing, fading, and WAV encoding all run locally.
What it does
- Trim: drag the two handles to select a region, preview it, and keep only that part.
- Join: load several clips, order them by dragging, and splice each one's selection end to end into a single track (mixed to a common sample rate and channel count).
- Ringtone: one button sets a 30-second selection — the classic iPhone/Android ringtone length.
- Fades & volume: optional fade-in/out on the edges and a gain slider.
Honest limitations
- Export WAV (lossless, universal — every phone and editor accepts it) or an MP3 at 128, 192, or 320 kbps when you want a smaller file to send. The MP3 encoder (LAME) is inlined so it still works fully offline; note that re-compressing already-lossy audio loses a little more quality, so reach for MP3 when size matters and WAV when it doesn't.
- Load an audio file or a video — Tape Desk pulls the audio track straight out of an MP4, MOV, or WebM and drops the video, so you can trim the sound out of a clip. Which formats open depends on your browser's built-in codecs; MP3, M4A/AAC, OGG, WAV, and MP4/MOV/WebM audio work in every modern browser, and exotic formats may not.
- WAV files are large (about 10 MB per stereo minute) — fine for ringtones and clips, heavy for a whole album.
Same shelf: File Mill converts the WAV to MP3 and back · Photo Cleaner and The Redactor do for images what this does for sound — local, private edits.
Part of K-Engine Local Tools — free, privacy-respecting utilities that run
on your device. The waveform view, trim/join/fade, and WAV encoder are hand-written;
view-source and you're reading them. MIT licensed, from the
K-Engine workshop ·
download the source.